A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

Coming Soon:

The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

To contact me about organizing, email me at rpwolff750@gmail.com

Total Pageviews

Archive of Wolff Materials

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

A CHASTENED RESPONSE TO JD

On Sunday last, I posted some sarcastic remarks about the NY
TIMES Op Ed column by Ross Douthat.Rather
than respond in kind, JD penned a thoughtful defense of Douthat that rather put
my cheap shots to shame.I think JD
deserves a serious response.Let me
begin by reprinting JD's comment, which, in my opinion, makes a better case for
Douthat than Douthat made for himself.Herewith JD:

"It seems like a rather
coherent column to me; a form is readily discernible. I'm not equipped to
comment on the issue he takes with Piketty's economic analysis– his criticism
is brief, and it's likely you could answer it much better than I can say whether
it is true or false.

However, his point is clear. In fact, his point is only a suggestion (a
suggestion, however, that he clearly takes to be the case): a neglected victim
of capitalism's destruction has been the cultural and spiritual resources which
past generations have relied on and which are counted as some of the dearest
fruits of civilized societies. He is suggesting that these goods are more
imminently threatened than even economic equality and that the left, due to a
neglect of questions of spiritual care and the importance of shared culture,
has failed to see this and so even presently fails to have a clear view of the
crisis of our times. He is suggesting not just a crisis of means but a crisis
of values, ethos and community sustaining mythos. He is chalking up some of the
right's recent successes to its ability (if only in rhetoric) to tap into these
insecurities and fears that we are losing, or have mostly lost, the spiritual
and cultural goods which give money and means more than their base, sub-human
value."

This is an eloquent statement of an old, familiar,
and honorable tradition in political theory, a tradition that has a right to
claim for itself the adjective "conservative."The Myth of the Golden Past is, of course, as
old as Western Civilization, but the particular form of it that JD invokes was
born in the late eighteenth century as a reaction to the rise of what
eventually became known as capitalism.Marx correctly observed that capitalism is the most revolutionary force
ever unleashed on the world.In eighteenth
and nineteenth century England, and a bit later on the Continent, it undermined
the authority and the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, transformed London
and the other great cities of England, ate away at and finally destroyed the
age-old division between city and countryside, and threw up a class of New Men
who, in a single generation, without familyconnections or landed estates, became unimaginably wealthy.

Speaking broadly, there were three thoughtful
responses to this phenomenon.The first
was the response of those who were called Liberals, writers who celebrated the
changes and wrote confidently that the manifest evils of the young capitalism
-- urban slums, brutal factory work, an economic cycle of booms and busts --
were merely the growing pains of a brave new world, soon to be replaced by a stable order of
endless growth.The second response was
that of the Socialists, who welcomed the destruction of the old order but
insisted that the chaos of capitalism must be replaced by rational management
for the common good.Marx was not the
first to voice this vision.He was
simply the most brilliant and the most penetrating in his anatomization of the
inner exploitative structure of capitalism.

The third response, which appeared in England
and France as early as the end of the eighteenth century, was that of
Conservatives.There were many observers
of the passing scene who looked with horror on the destruction wrought by
capitalism, seeing it not as a force for growth and liberation but rather as the
enemy of all they held dear.I do not
think I will elicit much protest from my brethren on the right if I say that
greatest among these voices was that of Edmund Burke.In 1797, Burke wrote an impassioned response
to the events in France under the title Reflections
on the Revolution in France.Letme quote at length the most famous passage
from that seminal work, for it says eloquently what Douthat was reaching for
and what JD very nicely summarized.Here
is Burke, answering the claims of the social contract theorists of his
day.I have highlighted the portion of
the passage that is most often quoted:

"Society is
indeed a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional
interest may be dissolved at pleasure—but the state ought not to be considered
as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee,
calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little
temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence;
because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal
existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all
science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all
perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many
generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living,
but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be
born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great
primæval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher
natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed
compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all
moral natures, each in their appointed place. This law is not subject to the
will of those, who by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are
bound to submit their will to that law. The municipal corporations of that
universal kingdom are not morally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their
speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder
the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial,
uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. It is the first and
supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen, but chooses, a
necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion, and demands no
evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no
exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that
moral and physical disposition of things, to which man must be obedient by
consent or force; but if that which is only submission to necessity should be
made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the
rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and
order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world
of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow."

The England whose loss Burke was lamenting was in fact a
land of servitude and grinding poverty for the many and inherited wealth,
leisure, elegance, and culture for the few.But that was not an image worthy of Burke's eloquent invocation.It was at roughly at this time that there was
born the fantasy of Merrie Old England, a time of maypole dances and madrigals,
of soft summers and manageable winters, of simple pleasures blessed by a
benevolent Church.[Not by Burke, by the
way!]

This is the sensibility to which Douthat is appealing, and
in his column, it is thoroughly disingenuous and dishonest.First of all, Douthat is not harking back to
medieval England, or even Colonial America. His Golden Age transparently is the Fifties, a
world in which the Roman Catholic Mass
was still celebrated in Latin and Rosie the Riveter had turned her tools over
to returning servicemen and had gone back to the kitchen, a world in which June
and Ward Cleaver slept in separate beds and had sex only the requisite two
times to produce Wally and The Beaver.It happens also to be a time, as Piketty shows us, in which wealth was,
temporarily, less unequally distributed than it had been earlier and would be
later, a time of rapid economic growth to replace what had been lost in the
depression and war years.

But of course Douthat's American version of Merrie Old
England was also a time of quasi-slavery for African-Americans, of back street
abortions and stifled ambitions for the female half of the population, a time
of the closet for gay and lesbian men and women.Douthat neither cares about nor bothers to
recall these unpleasant facts, and I rather imagine does not even considerthem truly unpleasant.

When all is said and done, what is Douthat's column really about?Quite simply, he is worried that Piketty
might encourage people to take away some of the great wealth concentrated in
the hands of the few and spread it around to those whose labor actually created
it.And along the way, they might once
again take notice of the role played by the Church in blessing and sanctifying
the exploitation of working men and women.

That, or something like it, is what was in my mind when I
penned my cheap shots at Douthat.I apologize
to JD for not taking the time to spell it all out, and I thank him or her for
recalling me to my better self.

4 comments:

I'm appreciative of your response, Robert! Thanks for pointing me toward Burke as well. Personally, I tend to think there is something missing from modern life along the lines of what could be called religion or folk-spirit...basically, some sort of shared symbolic interface to help mediate the wonderful and terrible paradoxes of life to us with a dignity that we just can't hope to find in the language and mode of our present mediators: corporate creatures with their logos and tag-lines, advertising, hollywood cinema, and endless litanies to a diversity irrespective of substance...

It's somewhat unfortunate in my eyes that one can not find any collective response to the need for for a more noble mediation except in forms of religions whose moral past is admittedly quite murky and whose future viability remains doubtful. Still, the urge I well understand. On a popular level, I don't think the left addresses this need well which is why natures like my own are inevitably drawn to conservative ideologies. I myself do not at present have a political affiliation, but am only observing the what and the how of the attractiveness of given world-views. Douthat struck one chord with me– however little I know about his economic cares–that the left often fails to get at, and perhaps could learn something from. Material equality, at least at the rhetorical level, is really not enough of a vision.

It is in this sphere that radicals can make some common cause with true conservatives, against the soullessness of classical liberalism. I find what you are speaking about in comradeship with men and women with whom I band together to fight for justice. That is not merely an instrumental colition but a life-changing bond of a common vision for the good society. To find that it is not necessary either to retreat into religion or to accept the inequality defended by those who today call themselves conservative. In the old days, we had all the good songs!

A strange thing to me: when my grandparents and family of their generation get together, they sometimes begin a festive meal with a toast and song that toasts to health and the goodness of the old country.

For myself and my generation, when we get together it's not really possible for us to spontaneously break into a song that does not bear an artist's name, a song that seems to come authorless "from the mist," as it were. Certainly we would never spontaneously sing "O Canada"– and probably for good reason. Similarly, my grandmother, whose literacy is probably below grade-school level, has on some occasions recited a poem from memory about the tribulations and disappointed hopes found in the trials of immigration and the search for a better life. Of my generation, most of whom have a university education, one would pretty much never hear a social recitation of poetry, never mind something committed to memory!

Without condemning myself or my peers, this disturbs me on an instinctual level. Admittedly, these are just anecdotes and one should even put one's instincts to the test. Further, these sorts of moments/ experiences I am speaking of, can only come organically, it seems. Still, personally I feel doomed to wander a world cut off from my ancestors, which is thereby in a certain way stale, lacking dimension, left to feasting in a crowd where the only song we all know by heart is likely to be "The Bohemian Rhapsody."

Am I wrong in thinking that there's a difference between conservatives pining for the good old days and the classical republican argument that a moral citizenry is a necessary precondition for good government (and a good economy)?

Burke and other conservatives definitely incorporated this argument into their rationalized nostalgia, but it's also voiced outside the conservative tradition by Machiavelli, Tocqueville and the founding fathers in a way that is divorced from a general defense of the status quo.

Today communitarian's like Michael Sandel appear to be the standard bearers for this set of ideas. And while Sandel may look conservative when he regards the values at stake worth conserving, he seems anything but when he feels otherwise.

While there was no shortage of things to complain about in the 50s (I think the 60s may have brought up some of those issues), the fact that the militancy of capital was slightly diminished and the feeling that we're all in this together was slightly heightened seems at least partially responsible for the rise of the post-war middle class and that has to be a good thing. The completely amoral capitalism that reemerged under Reagan drove out the last vestiges of the post-war capitalism that was at least partially constrained by moral and social norms and did contain some of the communal values JD recognizes we now lack. (For the record, I'm not saying post-war capitalism was idyllic or even good, only that it was far better than what came next.)

Then again, I wasn't born until the 70s, so everything I've been told about the post-war era may be wrong. I have constructed this history from mainly liberal sources, so may ignorance of more radical histories may have allowed me to be duped.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.